TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021) • Hacker News Board

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#161

Post by DharmaPolice » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #7

overthemoon wrote: post #5

Tik Tok is the reason I've been told several times I have ADHD. Pretty sure I don't! This phenomenon is so infuriating. The only half-convincing defense I've heard of it is that it could, maybe, theoretically, disseminate information about illnesses to people who don't have the money to see a professional, but the other effects are so much worse it doesn't seem worth it.

Tiktok and pop-culture generally make me very skeptical on "ADHD", the so-called "spectrum" and "neurodivergence" generally. I'm not saying these things don't exist, but much of it seems very difficult to falsify -- which needs to be the gold standard of determining these sort of things; e.g. "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"

People having these issues is real, it's the severity that's the question. I don't think it's a matter of someone being neurodivergent or not - it's that there is likely a bell curve type distribution on a lot of psychological attributes (how long you can concentrate as an example) and the people at the lowest end of the curve might require some sort of intervention in order to live happy productive lives. There are also going to be a far larger group of people who are merely below average and who find education in particular harder than their peers but who don't qualify for any medical or psychological intervention.

I suspect it's this latter group that social media diagnosis appeals to most - if you're not doing as well as you (or your parents) would like then normally you just have to feel stupid/worthless. These (self) diagnosis provide a level of explanation (and therefore comfort).

I self-diagnosed myself with mild ADD many years ago and even self-medicated (which in terms of productivity worked well). But meeting people with severe ADHD made me reconsider my alleged issues - sure, I can't concentrate for as long as I'd like but these people couldn't sit still for 15 seconds.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#162

Post by jimmaswell » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #15

For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to unt…

I've joked that Tik Tok is a Chinese psyop meant to weaken the next generation of the west (it's banned in China itself), but it looks less like a joke all the time.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#163

Post by andsoitis » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

> "Despite how great the newfound mental-health awareness is among teens, there seems to be a trend of using mental-health diagnoses as a social currency,” he said.

Is it healthy to be so acutely aware of mental health when you're a teen, though? Why is disability valid social currency? Is it because we also see adults tap into victimhood as currency?

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#164

Post by falcolas » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:12 PM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #7

overthemoon wrote: post #5

Tik Tok is the reason I've been told several times I have ADHD. Pretty sure I don't! This phenomenon is so infuriating. The only half-convincing defense I've heard of it is that it could, maybe, theoretically, disseminate information about illnesses to people who don't have the money to see a professional, but the other effects are so much worse it doesn't seem worth it.

Tiktok and pop-culture generally make me very skeptical on "ADHD", the so-called "spectrum" and "neurodivergence" generally. I'm not saying these things don't exist, but much of it seems very difficult to falsify -- which needs to be the gold standard of determining these sort of things; e.g. "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"

We can't seem to have a discussion about neurological disorders without someone denying the existence - while trying to appear like they are not - of some of the best explored neurological disorders based on some fuzzy skepticism that displays they have read none of the vast swaths of scientific studies that exist on the topic.

> By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?

Easy: is the severity of the ADHD and Autistic traits you exhibit low enough that they do not impair your ability to function on a day-to-day basis in society? If not, you don't have ADHD or Autism.

What does not impaired look like compared to impaired?

- Struggling to focus on something for minutes or hours, vs. being unable to concentrate on a task.

- Occasionally struggling with overcoming mental hurdles to perform a task vs frequently being incapable - yes, literally incapable, no matter the reward or punishment - of performing a task.

- Focusing on a task you enjoy while still being aware of the state of your body - keeping reasonably hydrated, fed, and use of the facilities - vs. not being aware.

- Occasionally forgetting words - like "watch" - or names, vs frequently.

- An occasionally compromised working memory (typically with an outside trigger like alcohol or lack of sleep), compared to a permanently compromised working memory. Compromised being able to store 4 items in your short term memory when the average for the populace is 7.

- Occasionally forgetting that items and people exist if they are not in your direct sight, versus constantly forgetting, where constantly means remembering is the exception instead of the norm.

One final note - ADHD is not some new disorder unique to the TikTok generation. ADHD has been formally recognized and studied as far back as 1902 by Sir George Frederick Still.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#165

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

ryukafalz wrote: post #131

Ardon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's an interesting phenomenon where the lower bound of "bad influences" has gotten much lower in a lot of places that used to be safe. Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving. Now, with TikTok, the o…

> Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more. This may be new-ish but I’m not sure it’s that new. I grew up with the early web in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it’s always been pretty unfiltered. It wasn’t centralized in the way TikTok is, but plenty of us grew up on the web wi…

Surely the scale and speed of information flow has greatly increased since the late 1990s and early 2000s so as to not be comparable to today.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#166

Post by iamacyborg » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

kzrdude wrote: post #14

nippoo wrote: post #9

Related: medical students' disease! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease

One item in the article is: + Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1 at line 1392: bad argument #1 to 'pairs' (table expected, got nil). That's new to me. I didn't know wikipedia had adopted lua for its templates.

Lua is used extensively on Mediawiki sites for templating.

For example, all infoboxes use this module.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Infobox

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#167

Post by originalvichy » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

I can't stop seeing the heavy gender skew in online communities centred around these topics. Both the sexual orientation as well as mental disorder communities like this seem to be most popular among teenager or young adult women. As a man I don't know how teenage hormones affect girls different than boys at that age, so I can't even give an uneducated guess as to what could be the source of this attraction towards quirky sexual orientations and pronouns or mental disorders.

Us boys certainly had our fair share of weird and destructive online communities, but not like this I am sure.

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#168

Post by faeriechangling » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

xwdv wrote: post #87

nemo44x wrote: post #15

For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to unt…

Quoted post unavailable.

Normal is a relative concept.

What is statistically normal? In the General Social Study between 1990 and 2014, the amount of men reporting same sex sexual encounters more than doubled. Why wouldn't they decide to get pounded (and/or admit to it) with less stigma and all the good looking guys out there?

We're measuring gender in the same way we measure same sex sexual behaviour, which is self-report data, and it seems unsurprising to me more people would report being a different gender as the stigma goes down and more people are even aware that it's an "option"

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#169

Post by macspoofing » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

faeriechangling wrote: post #139

I've done a lot of thinking about this issue, and there's two topics I notice. First, disability has become a status symbol in certain circles. Second, the huge rise in self-diagnosed disability. On the latter point, these kids are acting out these disabilities with such sincerity and 24/7 consistency that they effectively are disabled for all practical purposes, it's just that the diagnosis might be different than t…

>I think the TikTok videos are a symptom, what's the cause?

Why don't you think TikTok videos specifically (and social media generally) are not a cause? At this point, we know the addictive and viral effects of social media, especially as it pertains to teenagers and kids (and especially teenage girls).

Re: TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

#170

Post by marcodiego » Mon, Aug 01, 2022, 2:15 PM UTC

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #104

marcodiego wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers. This is also a good recipe to plant prejudice. I'm glad parents no longer have such a strong influence.

This is an absolutely abhorrent take.

You have to consider how things are on underdeveloped countries: people live their whole life without ever laving their city, cities have small populations and many are relatives, people develop wrong concepts that they just don't want to question because "everybody they know has been do it that way forever". Populations develop bad habits and keep them, the lack of contact with other cultures makes them think everything different from what they are used to is wrong. That is how you get a significant population of a country to be unashamedly homophobic, atheophobic, xenophobic and develop religion-related prejudices.